Stage Precision

Optitrack Camera

Optitrack provides a wide range of camera sensors for tracking purposes. SP supports the Optitrack Prime and Slim cameras.

Adding the Sensor

To add a connection to an Optitrack camera, open the Object Tree and add the Optitrack Camera under the category “Sensors”.
Alternatively, an Optitrack volume can detect all the Optitrack cameras in the network and allow you to add them into the project.

All settings to configure the sensor are in the Inspector.

First choose the Camera, and enter the Serial number of the unit in the Serial field

If camera is connected, it appears green in the Object Tree, and the Available state would change to “on”.

Additional Settings

Name Description
Tracking Mode
  • Marker – IR based dots that can either be Active or Passive
  • Image – using computer vision for tracking
Marker Support
  • Active – Only OptiTrack Active Markers are tracked
  • Passive – any object that is emitting or reflecting IR
  • Both – using both Active and Passive markers as valid object
Available Status indicator whether the device is connected or not
Serial The serial number of the camera
Id The ID number that user can assign to the camera
Framerate The framerate at which the camera is operating at
Exposure The amount of time that the camera exposes per frame
Threshold The minimum brigtheness for a pixel to be seen by a camera, with all pixels below the threshold being ignored. Increasing the threshold can help filter interference by non-markers, while lowering the threshold can allow dimmer markers to be seen by the system.
Intensity The amount of IR light to be emitted by the camera module if the camera supports this function
Radius Threshold The threshold of how SP reconstructs a marker
VideoType
  • Grayscale – Raw full resolution, uncompressed, grayscale image (for reference only)
  • Object – on-camera detection of marker reflections and their centroids.
  • MJPEG – MJPEG-compressed grayscale mode. can run at full frame rate and be synchronized with tracking cameras
  • Precision – on-camera detection of markers reflections and their centroids. Provides high-quality centroid locations but is very computationally expensive. Only recommended for low to moderate camera count
IR Filter Toggle the camera to view either visible or IR spectrum on cameras equipped with a filter switcher
Gain sets the gain level to amplify or diminish the brightness of the image
MJPEG Quality The quality of the MJPEG compression
Image Downscaling The amount of downscaling of the image from the camera
IR LED enable the IR LED of supported cameras
Colored LED Ring enable the colored LED indicator of the camera. When enabled, the Display Item Color in SP would be used as the color value for the colored LED indicator
Display Label enable the display of camera label in the viewport
Display Overlay enable additional information from the camera to be overlaid on the video signal
Display ID enable the front display to show the ID of the camera
Status LED Intensity The brightness of the Status LED of the camera
Process Image Enable SP to process the raw image from the camera. When doing calibration or tracking, can disable this to reduce the load on SP
Grid Display *None – disable this camera from the Object Grid *Image – display the image feed from the camera *Points – display the points that are detected by SP

Mask

The ability to create a mask from the camera to block out specific points or regions of the image from the tracking calculation.

Press the “Capture” button to camera a frame from the camera feed to allow manual drawing of the mask easier.

Automask – the function to automatically generate a mask based on what the current image from the camera

Projection

If only one optitrack camera is used and would like to project the tracked markers onto a plane, users can make use of the Projection Plane and select a target plane to project onto.

Templates

These are different templates for changing the settings of the cameras to better facilitate the process of Aiming, Calibrating and Tracking.
To swtich the camera into using one of these templates, right click on the camera and under Templates, Use xxxx.
Different parameters can be added into the template by following the basic structure of Parameter Name = Value. These values can be manually entered in from the text field, or right click on the camera, under Templates, Update xxxx will pull the current values for the specified parameters and update the corresponding template with these values.